Many if not most products and services are now available for purchase in advance by telephone, where the purchaser remits payment by simply communicating a credit card number or the like to the seller. When the purchased service is to be rendered at some later time, however, there are currently few efficient methods of communicating identifying information back to the purchaser for use by the seller in identifying that purchaser at the time of rendering service. Thus, for example, an airline will later mail pieces of printed paper constituting tickets identifiable by the airline. Such practices suffer from several disadvantages.
The purchaser does not have instant, presentable confirmation of the purchase, and must wait for the arrival of tickets, etc. Further, such tickets are costly, difficult to quickly replace if lost and are generally subject to easy forgery. More importantly, the verification of such tickets generally requires human! verification and collection of that information for the particular event or use. In addition, tickets or vouchers are often made of paper products that are not reusable by the seller such that the seller must constantly purchase products necessary to generate the ticket or voucher. Used tickets or vouchers also constitute environmental waste. Tickets and vouchers can be cumbersome and not easily stored by the purchaser.
It is the object of the present invention to arrive at an automated payment verification method which does not suffer from these disadvantages in time and cost.